Fun skill patches offered by Adafruit

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Phil Torrone of Adafruit sent me a bag full of maker skill patches. When my 9-year-old daughter came home from school today, her eyes popped out like a Tex Avery wolf. I told her she could have them all, but she has to earn them! I'll work with her to help her earn the LED patch first.

This gadget does exactly as promised: it looks like a thumbdrive (sort of) and fries the circuitry of any computer it’s plugged into. It’s made from camera flash parts, is charged with a standard AA battery, and delivers a 300V zap of DC destruction to the port for all your USB-murdering needs. Note that this […]

The Cobham catalog, exposed by The Intercept, features countless pages of surveillance gadgets sold to U.S. police to spy on American citizens: tiny black boxes with a big interest in you. In the creepily bland feature lists and nerdy product names is a whisper of a dark future; perhaps darker than anyone can imagine.

This image depicts the most commonly-found stylesheet colors on the web’s top sites—Paul Hebert did an amazing amount of analysis and this is just one of the intriguing visualizations he came up with. Most of these are obvious staples, especially HTML red and blue, though it’s interesting how far the blue “cluster” is from the […]

The Black Friday Mac Bundle 2.0 is one of the Boing Boing Store’s best-selling Mac bundles yet, and it’s about to come to an end. If you don’t get your copy now, here’s what you’ll be missing:This bundle comes packing 9 top-rated Mac apps in one package, at the hugely discounted price of just $23.99. […]

The Boing Boing Store’s Gift Guide is full of ideas for pretty much anyone in your life like hipster ice cub trays, Xbox controllers, Halo Boards, and even diamond necklaces. As always, all products in the Boing Boing Store come at great discounts, too. Shop by price bucket starting at under $20. Under $20:Bloxx Jumbo Ice Trays […]

Unlike traditional lighters, the SaberLight features an electronic plasma beam that’s both rechargeable and butane-free. This sleek lighter is even approved by TSA, so you’ll never be stuck buying lighters you’ll just have to throw away partially used. For some people, like me, this is a pretty big game-changer. The SaberLight’s beam is actually both hotter and cleaner […]

-500 internet points for their web store forcing you to check out using Google accounts or PayPal rather than just checking out as a guest. I’ve tried resetting passwords for both accounts, but cannot do so and can’t even make a complaint to the company without an order number. Ridiculous.

Hi there Mr Octochicken! We do our best to provide as many methods of checkout as possible, right now we have Express Checkout using Paypal/Google. For Credit Cards, an account must be made (since we need shipping/billing addresses, phone# , etc)
If you’re having any problems using the site, please visit http://www.adafruit.com/contact/ where you can send an email thru our web interface (no login or order # required) or simply email support@adafruit.com and we’ll help you reset your account
We hope to make the checkout process easier & better, thanks!

The edging on these patches is done with a machine invented by one of my relatives, Joseph Merrow. (He invented overlock stitch machines in general, including the ones that edged your baby blankets and that made the seams in your pants. ) The company has been in the family for 174 years now. The only problem with these machines is that they never wear out and never become obsolete. I wish I could find a video showing the ballet of cams inside, but here’s a video of one in use: